Text and the Context: Locating Explicitly Religious TV serials in Bangladesh

Abstract

This paper draws on a new genre of televised drama serial from Bangladesh, which could be categorised as Islamic ‘cultural activism’ besides the obvious commodity nature of the product. In this paper, I intend to contextualise its emergence and show the relations it maintains with public discourses. In contemporary Bangladesh, more than a dozen Bangla satellite TV stations are running with a good diversity of ideological standing. Though all the channels have religious programmes at the margin of their programme schedule, only the ATN Bangla, the first satellite Bangla channel in the country, aired religious drama serials, where one finds construction of romance, marriage, bribery, a severe critique of the secular way of life and a sense of unparallel superiority of Islam and Allah. It is also noticeable that religious practices in these constructions become synonymous with worldly success and a peaceful happy life. In the world of fictional construction, ‘Islam’ works as the unmoved mover of every action and deed, where ‘bad Muslims’ may ascend to transient worldly success, but they never find the fragrance of happiness as they are deprived of the grace of Allah. However, to evade the fire of hell, they ultimately turn back to a ‘good’ way of life as prescribed in Islam when they realise their ‘wrongs’ in these narratives. In this paper, I examine why the popular genre of ‘romance’ is being appropriated in these explicitly religious drama serials in a certain historical juncture and how they cross the boundary of a single mediascape, thanks to the newer media forms, and participate in fabrication of a ‘new’ Bangali Muslim identity in Bangladesh and elsewhere.